How I Paid Off $89,000 of Debt in Just 2 Years Working From Home

By the end of this post, we are going to be friends and because I know this I’m going to talk to you like a friend.

This post is legit. This post isn’t going to sell you on some snake oil are hide some big secret from you.

I’m going to tell you how I legitimately paid of $89,000 in debt in two years but before we get into that part, let’s talk about how I got into so much debt in the first place.

My Money Mindset

First things first.

I’m terrible with money.

I’m not bad with it, I’m terrible with it. I seem to get rid of it just as fast as I make it.

Why?

I like things and money helps me get them.

I like experiences and money helps me get them.

It’s just how I am and I really don’t plan on changing because I like the life that I live.

However, that’s not where all of the debt comes from. Most of the debt comes from student loans.

My wife and I both have Masters degrees in fields that we don’t work in (funny how that works) and just because we don’t work in those fields that doesn’t mean we can make our student loans disappear.

For the longest time, we were content paying what was needed each month to keep the lenders happy. Eventually, we ran into a bit of financial trouble and were thankfully able to defer our payments for a couple of months.

This is when we sat down and had a talk.

Making payments on things we don’t use sucks.

It sucks really hard so we had to figure out how to fix this situation because it wasn’t making us happy.

She took the approach of working within a budget and seeing where we could shift funds towards the loan payments.

Very smart, very reasonable.

However, I like my experiences and sacrificing a lot of the things that I love for YEARS just so I could pay off some stupid student loans just didn’t sound appealing to me.

So I approached the problem from the other end and ask how could I make MORE MONEY to pay these loans off quicker.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit

I think everyone has a bit of entrepreneurism in them. No, that’s not a word but let’s pretend it is for a bit.

Many of us have ideas that our imaginations tell us will be brilliant and make us rich.

I’ve always been this way and I’ve discovered many times that my ideas aren’t that great or make me rich.

So what I decided to do was sit down and study others to see what was working for them.

I was amazed that an individual could make that much from a blog and I was pissed off that I hadn’t gotten on this train yet.

However, was this just a one-person fluke? Were others making good money online?

I continued to research and came across Michelle Gardner and discovered she was making ridiculous money as well so I studied everything that she was doing.

I must’ve studied dozens of blogs. I read all of their posts and signed up to receive all of their emails.

It was like cramming for a final exam and one thing that struck me was that they weren’t doing anything crazy.

They were simply providing value to their audience on a consistent basis.

There wasn’t anything that they did that I couldn’t do.

There isn’t anything that they do that you can’t do now.

It was beautiful and I knew I had to get into it so I did.

A Blog for Geeks

I have no problem calling myself a geek so I figured it would be cool to create a blog for geeks. The goal was to write about whatever topics I liked and I thought other geeks would be interested in.

The site did okay. Not great but okay.

The main problem with it was that it was very hard to gain traction because the blog didn’t really solve a specific problem besides how to kill time when waiting in line for coffee.

I didn’t see it making the type of money that Pat Flynn makes so I sat down again and looked at what these bloggers were doing.

The one thing was obvious: they were teaching others to how build businesses.

How to make money is always going to be one of the most successful businesses money wise but I felt like I couldn’t enter it unless I knew what I was talking about. I now know that isn’t necessarily true but I still want to write from a place of experience.

So I switched gears and started a health blog. Health is obviously a big topic so I knew an audience was out there but I had to figure out what the audience wanted.

The only thing I could think about doing was to simply write a lot of different things to see what sticks. I call this casting a wide net and it took me some time before I landed on a topic that was working.

What was the topic? YOGA!

Yoga is huge and if you’re into yoga then you are REALLY into yoga. Like ridiculously so.

I call this irrationally passionate because to outsiders it makes no sense but if you’re in the yoga world then you completely understand.

Anyways, I started to write about yoga and my traffic started to increase.

At this point, my blog is reaching hundreds of thousands of people each month and when you are getting that kind of traffic it’s hard NOT to make money.

But how was I going to make money?

Methods to Making Money to Pay Off Debt

There a ton of ways to make money blogging and I don’t want to dive into them but for the purpose of this post I decided that I was going to start with ads and affiliate marketing.

These are two of the most obvious ways to make money blogging.

With ads, I could make between $2,000 – $4,000 a month depending on how well the traffic was doing. When you combine that with $1,000 – $3,000 a month in affiliate marketing revenue you have a good amount of money to go towards your debt.

When people talk about “passive income” this is what they are talking about:

I make money during all hours of the day. Now my site had multiple revenue streams that were bringing in thousands of dollars each month.

It took a lot of work and there were some months when nothing was happening but eventually, it all starts to click.

Paying Off Debt

It’s a weird thing to pay off your debt. If it’s around long enough you just get used to it being there like an ugly mole. It’s not that you don’t notice it anymore. It’s just that you know it’s there and it ain’t going anywhere so why worry about?

However, when you pay it off you catch yourself making sure that you have the money to pay it each month…except you don’t.

There is a weird weight that is lifted off your shoulders.

When people say money can’t buy happiness I don’t think that’s totally true. When you no longer have financial stress your view on life changes. You become happier because that burden is gone.

Is this buying happiness? I guess that can be left to debate.

Now with a success story under my belt, I felt I had the knowledge to teach others so I started the Billionaire Blog Club. In fact, the wonderful person behind this blog, Jasmine, is a member.

I know this method is a bit different than others that talk about paying off debt. Most people will tell you to budget your life but that doesn’t work so well when you are barely making enough to make ends meet.

I believe in a high quality of life. I want to enjoy life because I only have one. For me, that means being proactive with things so I decided to figure out how to make more money.

And I did.

So how did I pay off $89,000 in 2 years? By making $273,000 through blogging.

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